The Composer thinks he is ‘au fait’ with the English language. Over the past months, when asking guests about their accommodation, the places they visit or other questions about their stay, the variety of answers has been bewildering.
“Why?” you may well ask. Well, the grammatical language we associate with those answers seem to have either gone out of fashion (except with a certain age group) and we have inherited new words which may leave us bewildered.
At one time, the answer ‘fine, thank you’ or ‘splendid’ or ‘exciting’ or even ‘great’ would have given The Composer an idea as to how the holiday, an attraction, or even the property a guest was staying in, measured up to expectations.
In has come words like ‘cool’ (yes, we got that one) ‘awesome’ (often uttered by our American cousins who use the word with unerring ease) followed by ‘wicked’, ‘totes’ and the weirdest word, ‘droolworthy’. Maybe not the most weird word as ‘sick’ was used to tell us about a certain young man and his escapades on the harbour wall at Eyemouth ‘cos YOLO’. The PAW code appeared regularly as two young females sat in the courtyard – the meaning of the code becoming even clearer on the reciting of the letters P-A-W as their parents appeared! (how dumb do young people think we are??Ha Ha)
So putting you out of your misery, ‘cool and awesome’ go down without a fight, while ‘wicked’ means just the opposite – ‘quite good’ in fact. ‘Totes’ is simply an abbreviation for ‘totally’ while ‘droolworthy’ leave the hormonal teen male assessing his potential girlfriend!! The ‘sick’ reference and ‘YOLO’ told us the young man was ‘happy’ jumping off the harbour wall cos ‘You Only Live Once’ while PAW proves that Parents Are Watching.
All this leads back to the beginning. What do the answers really tell us? It all depends how old you are! Our holiday properties, the warm and sunny holiday weather, the long evenings and the raft of attractions in Northumberland and Borders have all gained a new grammatical status thanks to many of our young guests. With the end of school holidays The Composer now assumes that a pleasant stay will once again be declared ‘perfect’, ‘splendid’ or perhaps ‘wonderfully relaxing’. Gone is ‘wicked’, ‘awesome’ and ‘sick’. Ah well, mind your language, you never know what you may be saying —-or hearing!